Читать книгу The Stream Runs Fast - Nellie Letitia McClung - Страница 14
ОглавлениеThe Winds of the World
The winds of the world began to blow as the nineteenth century came to an end, and they even found their way into our placid existence. I do not think our newspapers carried much world news, or if they did we were not interested, so the South African war came on us unexpectedly. There always had been trouble with the Zulus, an indefinite term to us, signifying black men with earrings who carried spears. Hadn't we read and recited a poem about a surprise attack on our gallant men as they slept their honest sleep on a mountain side in Africa? "While close on front and either flank the live black crescent crept." In my first acquaintance with this poem, I thought that the live black crescent was some deadly tropical insect.
The South African war assumed a very serious aspect when our young men were recruited, and went. To us there seemed to be no good reason for fighting the Boers, who had worked their own land and minded their own business, people much like ourselves who had battled with flood and storms, stone bruises and chilblains. We had all read Olive Schreiner's "Story of a South African Farm." Paul Kreuger's picture in the newspaper showed him to be an honest, rugged old fellow, closely resembling, with his square face and chin whisker, many of the faces in my father-in-law's ordination picture. We certainly could not feel any enmity to a man who looked like Dr. Morley Punshon.
We wondered what the war really was about. Was it the gold of Johannesberg and the diamond mines of Kimberley that had kindled all this flame of conquest? And in this uneasy suspicion we were not alone, for the news trickled through that one of the younger British statesmen, Mr. Lloyd George, a Welsh Baptist, had stoutly defended the Boers and been mobbed in Birmingham when he tried to speak.
I had been reading Prescott's History of Mexico, and I could not keep from wondering if we were not carrying on the same sort of conquest that Cortez carried on in the sixteenth century, when life was more barbarous. He was set at his task with the full blessing of the Church, steeped in the belief that the end justifies the means and that good can come from evil. The wholesale slaughter of the Aztecs was easily condoned when their gold and precious jewels went back to Spain to enrich the Mother Church. At our Epworth League meetings we debated these questions freely.
Meanwhile in Canada the tide of patriotism rose. Everyone was singing a new song called "The Soldiers of the Queen", which fanned the flame of Imperialism, and Kipling's "The White Man's Burden" made the soaring climax of many an address. It gave the whole business of war the high purpose of a Crusade and threw a glamor around the fighting man. We were not fighting for anything so cheap and corruptible as gold. We were paying our debt to the underprivileged, though perhaps ungrateful people of the world.
"Take up the White Man's burden, Send forth the best you breed, Go bind your men to exile To serve your Captive's need, To wait in heavy harness On fluttered folk and wild, Your new-caught sullen people, Half devil and half child. Take up the White Man's Burden And earn his old reward— The blame of those ye better, The hate of those ye guard, The cry of hosts ye humor (Ah slowly) toward the light. 'Why brought ye us from bondage Our loved Egyptian night?'"
There were other verses enlarging the theme of the white man's duty to "the lesser breeds without the Law," as he phrased it in his great Recessional, written in 1897.
Looking back at it now I remember how much we depended on Kipling. His words had a ring of Old Testament authority. We would have been happier about the war in South Africa if we had known that ten years after the end of hostilities Great Britain would hand back the country to the South Africans, and that the Union of South Africa would become one of our great allies.
Some glimpse of this settlement came to us in another one of Kipling's poems called "Kitchener's School," in which he tells something of the British plan of colonization. It is addressed to the people of the Sudan:
"He (Kitchener) has gone back to his city, Not seeking presents or bribes But openly asking the British To buy you Hakims and scribes. Knowing that you are forfeit by battle And have no right to live, He begs for money to bring you learning And all the English give. It is their treasure—it is their pleasure, Thus are their hearts inclined, For Allah created the English mad— The maddest of all mankind. They do not consider the meaning of things, They consult not creed or clan; Behold they clap the slave on the back And he ariseth a man. They terribly carpet the earth with dead And before their cannons cool They walk unarmed by twos and threes And call the natives to school."
This poem is probably one of Kipling's greatest contributions to the work of Empire building, for it touches the vital spot which marks the difference between the colonization done by Britain and that of some other countries that are much in our minds today.
But I must get back to my story and remember I am not writing a tract on colonization, but a story of plain people.
January 22nd, 1901, was a dull cold day in Manitou, Manitoba, with icy flakes of snow riding in on the wind that came out of the north west. A sullen sky threatened that the night would come down early. Horses hitched to sleighs stamped impatiently as the cold settled down on them, and the women in the stores waiting for the men to complete their business saw the short afternoon dulling into night, and anxiously wished to be on their homeward way.
Suddenly the news broke!
Thomas Atkinson, the C.P.R. operator, took the message from the wires. Mr. Atkinson had been listening to the talking wires all day and knew that trouble was brewing. Four days before he had heard that all was not well at Osborne House. But there were no magic air channels then to carry the news to the men on the roads or the women in the farm houses, and so the blow fell in country places with tragic suddenness.
Mr. Atkinson swung around in his swivel chair and despatched a messenger to the Fire Hall, the School, and the Presbyterian Church. Then he walked out into the small waiting room and lifted his hand for silence and announced—"The Queen is dead." Instinctively the men removed their hats.
In ten minutes the bells began to ring, hurriedly, noisily, their rusty notes jarring each other in their discordant passage, Andy Martin pulling the rope at the fire hall, John Logan at the school. But when the news reached the Presbyterian Church, August Henneberg with true Presbyterian forethought, knew what to do. August knew that tidings of sorrow were not expressed with a loud jangling of bells. So from the Church steeple came a measured tolling, solemn and dignified, and soon the other bells steadied and grew calm.
The streets filled with people, the roads leading into Manitou were dotted with sleighs. Chores or no chores, the people came in to see if it were really true.
When Blake Hewitt, late of Iowa, came in he went at once to the Farmers' Store, dropping his horse's halter shanks to make them believe they were tied. Mr. Robinson, the proprietor, who had removed his brown paper cuffs, stood inside the door talking to a group of customers. "What's all the excitement?" Mr. Hewitt asked. Mr. Robinson's voice was solemn and deep. "Queen Victoria is dead," he said. "The Queen is dead," Mr. Hewitt repeated, "so that's why the bells were ringing. I thought something was wrong."
Mr. Hewitt's listeners might not have noticed the words or seen anything objectionable in them, but unfortunately for Mr. Hewitt there was in the Farmers' Store at that moment, Mrs. John Farnicombe, whose mother had been one of Queen Victoria's ladies-in-waiting. Mrs. Farnicombe still had the bonnet given by Her Majesty to her mother.
In telling of the incident Mrs. Farnicombe said her blood seemed to turn to water as she heard what he said; her head swam; her knees grew weak. She could not believe her ears. He thought something was wrong, and the terrible man was gone before she rallied. Gone like Judas, Mrs. Farnicombe said—gone into the night! Oh how she wished she had withered him with a look. He thought something was wrong, indeed!
Mrs. Farnicombe, torn with indignation, told the story to groups of people in the store and on the street, and at last made her way to see her friend Mrs. Bamford who lived in a little white house near the Presbyterian Manse. Mrs. Bamford was everybody's friend, a sweet faced old lady with white hair and brown eyes. It was believed that she belonged to one of the titled families of England and had been disinherited because she had eloped with her father's coachman. But as she and her husband had never become confidential with the neighbors on this point, the matter was not definitely known. If she ever regretted her choice and longed for the marble halls she had left, she gave no sign, but continued to live happily and serenely. From her we heard many beautiful stories of the Royal Family; their kindness and courtesy, their consideration for other people.
When the news of the Queen's death was borne out across the fields in the rusty note of the bells, it fell upon our hearts with a stab of personal bereavement. She was more than a ruler to us. She was a legend, a tradition—the embodiment of maternal affection, goodness and piety. My mother had seen her once when she came to Dundee, and "had been almost near enough to touch her mantle". As a child I firmly believed that the Queen, in her generosity, had given us the twenty-fourth of May for a holiday at considerable inconvenience to herself, and that we must ever keep it in grateful remembrance.
On that dark January day when the bells were tolling for her I felt that I should do what I could to pass on my love for her to my children. Jack was the only one big enough to understand so I took him out with me. I wanted him to remember the solemn notes of the bells, the sad faces of the people, and he still remembers it—tho' he was not yet four years old.
On our way home we went in to see Mrs. Bamford. I told him the Queen had been as sweet and kind and lovely, with the same shiny white hair and beautiful hands. Mrs. Farnicombe came in while we were there, hot with raging anger because of a dreadful man who had made light of the death of the Queen. She related the conversation dramatically. "He said it, Mrs. Bamford," she cried tearfully, "'I thought there was something wrong' were his very words, as if the death of our Queen were not the greatest calamity we could suffer. . . . A wretched, ignorant foreigner, my dear, without hope or God in the world; with no reverence, no sanctities, and he would dare to speak of her thus, lying cold in death."
"Hush dear," Mrs. Bamford said soothingly, "my daughter will serve us a cup of tea and we will all feel better. Do not be so sure that Mr. Hewitt meant any disrespect. The Queen would be the first one to defend him. She once defended a boy who pointed a pistol at her, and the demented man who struck her on the head and crushed a lovely bonnet. When they were ordered to be flogged, it was the Queen herself who saved them. She won respect by being worthy of it, my dear, not by demanding it."
Before we left Mrs. Bamford had an explanation to cover Mr. Hewitt's words. "I think you have misjudged Mr. Hewitt," she said to her friend, "without meaning to do so. You were under the strain of deep emotion and read into his words a meaning of your own. Are you sure he didn't say—'I thought there was something wrong' meaning 'I knew there was something wrong'. That, my dear Mrs. Farnicombe, would make his words entirely innocent, and that is what I prefer to believe. That is what Her Majesty would wish us to believe, and I think it would be wise to say no more about it."
And there was no more said about it. The Queen's deputy had spoken.
